


to roam forever

by kalypsobean



Category: Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:22:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalypsobean/pseuds/kalypsobean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Andrea is kind of a psychopath and self-important, because he can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to roam forever

**Author's Note:**

  * For [penitence_road](https://archiveofourown.org/users/penitence_road/gifts).



The world around him is in disarray, a mess of colour and action and technology far beyond anything he can easily understand, break down and reform.

This is what he has become: someone outside of time, disconnected from those around him.

 

Sure, he pretends, just as everyone does, some more so than others; he fits himself into their circle, effortlessly moulding himself around them - the perfect son in law, the attentive friend. Silently, though, he laughs at them and their petty little lives, so insular and removed, so eager to please that they forget about themselves in their efforts to look more affluent than they are and climb ever higher in a hierarchy.

It all seems so pointless to him, but he plays the game just to see how it ends, well aware that he is just another pawn to be moved around and sacrificed in someone else's quest for power or revenge. He wonders, even now, who will be first to try.

 

~*~

 

There was once a man, who through no fault of his own, was ripped from everything he knew and placed in another world, one completely unlike his own. He should have felt out of place, adrift, perhaps confused or lost or scared, but he did not. He would have been forgiven for falling prey to despair, to hate or to anger, but instead, as if through the intervention of Fate herself, he became pure. All these unnecessary things were burned away, and when he was ready, before there was an end to his story, a man came and offered to change it.

 

~*~

 

He takes this time to observe, content to react and take, for what else is there but what life hands him - a woman, means, a social circle which is shorthand for rich and untouchable. There is something of the inevitable about it all; as if he had been born to this and it is only fair that he is given his due. 

Just what to do is beyond him, for while the social mores are easy to mimic and the politics are transparent and petty, this life of idle carefree impulse is uninteresting; he is bored within the rules and delicate balance of this web.

 

~*~

 

The man dreams, sometimes, of darkness, a cave perhaps, or a coffin, an existence devoid of light. He does not remember such a place, but the dream is vivid and it disturbs him even during the day, when artificial light seems to move around him as if repelled by some parallel darkness within him. The beauty surrounds him but he remains unmoved.

Even the darkness is not as truly dark as on those nights, when he wakes and his mind doesn't realise.

 

~*~

 

He is used to simple things; even their names seem to him to be fancy and rich as they trip off his tongue and he hides the way he struggles to remember them. They are all the same, anyway, interchangeable for all the way they are in and out of each other's lives like brothers or schoolboys, with their air of familiarity and easy abbreviated ways. He should belong; in appearance he is no different, but he feels apart from them even as they take him in right into their homes, like welcoming a viper waiting to strike. They never had to find their own food or a place to sleep; they never had their edges honed and finely tuned by life and coincidence and they never knew risk that could not be paid away.

He watches them, when he can. 

 

It would be amusing, if he could unravel that tight knot of other emotions around his heart, how easily they take to him; how simple it would be to just take this new life and live it in this uncomplicated prison that feels no different to the one he was yanked away from only weeks earlier. It is that ease which leads him to let it go, allow events to run their course without any help from him; there is no struggle, no fight to keep him interested, and he certainly isn't in a rush to trap himself in their net. They think he is affluent, based on just his appearance and the word of a man they don't know any more than they do their future, waiting around the corner to destroy them all. 

He will have her, just as soon as he's sure it won't keep him there when he's done; he'll do it when his claim is unassailable, and he will go through the motions until then. It is not difficult to behave as a gentleman and a rake, and his game with her still has rounds left to play. He knows how he wants it to play out; she will come to him and plead and he will not listen, and he will convince her.

He doesn't listen to that last shred of instinct in him that whispers of danger, for here there is nothing to fear but a lack of funds and the displeasure of people who don't mean anything to him beyond the ways he can use them up.

 

~*~

 

The man achieves his dream, tastes it in clean, sterile air and the tears of those he has stood on and crushed to reach it; he is still void in himself of the things he wanted to feel, of the things he wanted around him. Even though he has found his journey's end, it is but a waystation, and he must make himself anew once more.

 

~*~

 

He watches, dispassionate, as the cards begin to fall, surrendering like chess pieces of old. With only vague curiosity he sees that his part was not the one he would have cast for himself, though in the way the web weaves itself around him he sees an interesting kind of symmetry; he is two points that are far apart, and yet he can only be himself, he whom his existence has crafted him to be.

When it all comes crashing down, shattering around him, he is pulled back to who he was, as if his only purpose was to be the instrument with which the lives of those around him were to be rent to pieces.

 

He is himself in the darkness, awaiting the end.


End file.
